Storage access support for soft real-time applications

Most research on QoS-aware storage has focused on the use of QoS-aware disk schedulers. However, the increasing intelligence and autonomy of modern disk drives have made fine-grained external disk scheduling difficult. As this trend continues, providing QoS-aware storage through external disk schedulers may become infeasible in the future. In this paper, we present a coarse-grained approach to storage bandwidth management that does not rely on external disk schedulers. The goal is to provide better storage access support for storage-bound soft real-time applications. Our approach gives priority to disk requests generated by soft real-time applications by controlling the rate that best-effort disk requests may be dispatched.